Sooflymami's computer is having some dimming problems.

Her computer screen keeps dimming after a few mins. Then maybe a half hour later the light comes back on and then dims again. It does this repeatedly. This never happened to her computer before. She has no idea whats causing this and moving her mouse or typing when dimmed doesn't get it to go to default brightness. She does have a pet rabbit but doesn't know if it has anything to do with this.

 

Maybe the rabbit chews on the monitor cable and then the monitor dims, when the rabbit stops chewing, the monitor comes back normal?

 

The rabbit is the villain here, I think. Try to observe it for 2 days without looking to other things.

 

Sadly, you told us NOTHING about the computer. We don't even know if this is a PC with a separate monitor, or a notebook.

And what does "dim" mean? Does that mean she can still see everything and use the computer, but the brightness is way down? Or is the display almost totally dark and unreadable?

Whenever you have apparent monitor problems, the first thing you want to do is swap monitors to determine if the problem is with the monitor, or with the video data signal coming from the computer. If monitor 2 has the same issues on computer 1, the problem is with the computer/graphics solution. If issue moves to computer 2 with monitor 1, you know the monitor is having problems.

If "dim" means the display goes dark, shine a flashlight into the monitor and look very closely at the screen. If you can still see the desktop, icons, etc. then the problem is with the monitor's backlighting, typically the inverter, and/or the CCFL (florescent light) (if not LED backlit). Replacing the inverter and CCFL typically cost $50 - $150 in parts, plus 1 (2 max) hours labor.

 

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A similar thing happened to my Brother's lap top. It turned out that he had devoted too much resources to his copy of Returnel. When I reduced them to an acceptable level the screen brightened up for good.

 

Its a desktop running windows XP. It stays lit for about 20 or 30 minutes and then gets darker. Another 20 or 30 minutes later it comes back and then dims again after a few minutes. Moving the mouse/typing does not bring the brightness back after it darkens.

 

Again, you need swap monitors with another computer and see what happens. And shine a flashlight in there when it goes dark and see if desktop is in there.

And the coming and going of the display could be a sign of heat. It gets hot, some circuit fails (opens) and the display goes dark and cools down allowing the circuit to close and start working again, where it begins to heat up again. If that is what's happening, it will eventually stay dark.